West side or East side to Scotland?

In their prospectus “High Speed Rail” (Cm7827), HS2 show Fig 1.1, plans for motorways in 1943, and comment that the routes broadly reflect their own proposals for high-speed railways. That includes the very curious way that a route goes north to Scotland. Newcastle can't be left out because it an important town, but it has been treated as meanly as possible. If Newcastle must be connected to the west-side route, it would cut it off less and go over lower ground to go along the Tyne valley rather than the A66 which goes over high ground, often closed by snow.

It is hard to know whether this preference for a west side route existed before the idea of what we now call “motorways” of the 1930s, or whether the preference for a west side route was created by this decision. Dr Beeching wanted to close the Newcastle-Edinburgh route, but he wanted to keep the Tyne valley route.

What keeps alive this idea that a route to Scotland should be along the west side?

Maybe it is the neatness of a route either side of the Pennines and continuing the route north to Glasgow. What this fails to realise is that the Lakes and the Southern Uplands steer the route a long way west and that Manchester is to the east of Edinburgh. From Manchester it is 45 miles diagonally over the Pennines to Leeds and then northwards to the centres of the North East before reaching Scotland in about the same distance.

Many times more freight traffic goes along the west coast than the east, and very slowly over those steep gradients. The the east side has few gradients.

But how does this apply to passenger traffic?

In Cm7827 HS2 showed Figure 1.2 and Figure 1.3 showing that the trains were fuller on the east side in 2008 and were expected to even more so in 2033. (Notice the importance of Newcastle in 2033) Nevertheless HS2’s suggestion was a route to Scotland going north from Manchester via Carlisle, Carstairs(fork), to Glasgow & Edinburgh. They even discussed the practicalities of coupling and uncoupling trains at Carstairs!

In February 2015 HS2 formally abandoned their suggested link from Manchester (Piccadilly) to the WCML going northwards to Scotland, saying “it no longer makes sense”.

Why do Greengauge 21 and others still think it does make sense? How may we decide between east and west?Both options start from the fact that HS2’s plans reach Manchester and Leeds, the Humber-Mersey line. How should the route go on to Scotland? As ever, the costs and the benefits must be weighed. The benefits are the passengers whose journeys would be speeded up.From ORR Table 15.3. 000s of passenger journeys between Government office regions 2013-14 East of England East Midlands London North East North West Scotland South East South West Wales Cymru West Midlands

Passenger journeys between groups of regions, from the table above.Journeys/yearHumber-Mersey line and south – North East 7,077,000Humber-Mersey line and south - Scotland 6,226,000Scotland – North East 1,751,000

Note the heavy traffic between the North-East and Scotland; it is natural for there to be heavy traffic between neighbouring population centres. Note also that there is more traffic from the Humber-Mersey line and southwards to the North East than there is to Scotland.

“Utility” is calculated as passenger/miles of route because “miles of route” is a rough measure of cost. So the best route is Leeds, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, which is far better than the Manchester, Carstairs (fork), Glasgow and Edinburgh route. The next thing to do is to do is to extend the Leeds, Middlesbrough, Newcastle route to Edinburgh and Glasgow. This route captures the Scotland – North East traffic, as measured at the Humber-Mersey line it has a utility of 6,226,000 + 7,077,000/ 257 = 51, 762 passengers/mile of route. The extra passengers have not quite balanced out the extra distance.So I argue that the route should go north from Leeds via Middlesbrough and Newcastle to join end on end to the Edinburgh – Glasgow high speed route because this route:-